2009’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker
won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow,
and was hailed as a great film about the Iraq War. I agreed with that
assessment. The movie I’d most compare it to is Platoon (my favorite war film), as like Oliver Stone’s Vietnam
picture, it eschewed political messages and Hollywoodized sentiment and simply
presented an unfiltered look at warfare from the ground level.
The movie was also, according to many real veterans, highly
inaccurate in its depiction of Iraq. Now, inaccuracy doesn’t automatically doom
a movie (I mean, nobody watches Rambo
to get a realistic look at combat, do they?), but when a film is purported to
be a super accurate account of what it depicts, do allegations that it's not dim its power at
all?
I can’t say for certain with The Hurt Locker because I have yet to revisit it, but this thought
was there while watching Bigelow’s Zero
Dark Thirty. The film claims to be the definitive account of the search
for, and mission to eliminate, Osama bin Laden, and the production’s alleged consultation with the U.S. government suggests the filmmakers strived for
total accuracy. And yet, I couldn’t shake the Hurt
Locker allegations, and the controversy about this film on top of that, from my mind.
We all know the ending, so let’s get this out of the way:
The raid on bin Laden’s compound during the film’s last 40 minutes is a
fantastic work of filmmaking. It’s not a flashy Call of Duty-style firefight filled with explosions and extended shootouts
with several minions. The killings are quick, efficient, and unglamorous. Women
and children are in harm’s way, and some of them are killed, too. The mission’s
slow, methodical, no-frills execution, along with perfect editing, gives the
whole sequence a freeze-in-your-seat tension greater than any big action
sequence in an escapist summer movie. It feels very real.
Until that point, the film shows the efforts of the CIA to
locate the al-Qaeda leader. It’s a little like an espionage thriller, but
fictional spy tales tend to have a set structure and sequence of events and clues
for the viewer to piece together. In Zero
Dark Thirty, clues and leads are all over the place, with little or no
indication whether they’re of any value or dead ends. It’s not very easy to
follow, like trying to put together a puzzle with a million fake pieces mixed with the real ones, and
makes it seem like a miracle that the agency was able to find bin Laden.
What did find him, according to the film, was a lead pursued relentlessly over several
years by a CIA agent based in Pakistan known onscreen as Maya (Jessica
Chastain; the real names of those involved are not revealed, and all
characters are listed only by their first names). Chastain’s performance consists
almost purely of will, and she is a compelling center to the picture as she
navigates a near-labyrinthine web of false leads and tips, as well as badgers
her superiors and colleagues into following her lead when they believe it’s
just another wild goose chase. It almost seems a little farfetched that this one
person was so instrumental in locating bin Laden, but then, it also seems
like blind luck that her lead turned out to be correct among so many that went
nowhere.
Almost lost among the movie’s critical acclaim is a vocal
minority chastising it as pro-American War on Terror propaganda. It’s hard to make
that case watching the film. It’s very grim, almost hopeless in its tone. If
the ending weren’t a foregone conclusion, the movie could be mistaken for a lament on the zero-sum gains the U.S. has seen in the War on Terror, and even when the
raid is over and bin Laden is dead, the picture doesn’t take on a fist-pumping
patriotic tone, or even offer a sense of satisfaction.
Which leads me to the element of the film everyone’s talking
about: its depiction of torture. And yes, it makes it damn clear that what was
done to detainees was torture, as what happens to them onscreen is clearly
inhumane and cruel. It might be hard to watch for some on a visceral level, but
its effect is more sickening and infuriating from a moral standpoint, to see what our
country has done to people.
Bigelow has said that “depiction is not endorsement." Judging by her depiction of it, I don’t think she endorses torture. In fact, the main
torture sequence seems almost anecdotal, as if to show that torture does NOT
yield good results (which it specifically does not in the film). But the
depiction of its effectiveness is mixed overall. Other times, tortuous
methods seem like just part of the interrogation process. In one scene, when the characters
are watching a TV interview with then-President-elect Obama condemning torture (the only appearance by a President in the movie in any capacity),
they roll their eyes, either at the naiveté of the new Commander-In-Chief or
because his election means they’ll lose support for such interrogation methods.
If you were going by this movie alone, it’s hard not to get the sense that
torture contributed to getting bin Laden. According to some official reports,
that’s not true.
That’s the paradox about Zero Dark Thirty. Like The Hurt Locker, I’m not sure how real it is, but moreover, I don’t want it to be real. I can’t exactly say I liked the experience of the movie, not because of any flaw in the production—it’s technically masterful and quite compelling, worthy of many of the awards it’s been up for—but because of the horrible truths it depicts about what our country has carried out in our name.
